Bluez fails on Raspberry Pi running Jessie Headless - bluetooth

Question

I've run out of tutorials and tricks that worked for others but not for me.
I'm trying to pair a remote bluetooth speaker with my PI Zero.
When I attempt to connect I get the error message:
[bluetooth]# connect XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX
Attempting to connect to XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX
Failed to connect: org.bluez.Error.Failed
[bluetooth]#
And the log reports:
org.bluez.Manager.GetProperties() failed:
org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.UnknownMethod: Method "GetProperties" with
signature "" on interface "org.bluez.Manager" doesn't exist
I have no idea where to begin addressing that. The logs also report
Unable to contact D-Bus: org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.NotSupported:
Unable to autolaunch a dbus-daemon without a $DISPLAY for X11
and
a2dp-sink profile connect failed for XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX: Protocol not
available a2dp-source profile connect failed for XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:
Protocol not available
I'm sure there's useful information in there but every time I think I've googled a solution I'm disappointed. Moving the load of the discoverable module until after X11 load didn't work. Purging pulseaudio and reinstalling it didn't help. Any ideas?

Answer 1

Somewhere on some thread someone said that Pulseaudio had to be version 6.0 or greater, which led me down the rabbit hole of installing version 7, which broke on Jessie due to incompatible dependencies.
Ultimately I purged the following:
apt-get purge pulseaudio pulseaudio-module-bluetooth libpulse0
And reinstalled
apt-get install pulseaudio pulseaudio-module-bluetooth
I then unpaired the Alexa from the pi via the Alexa app on my phone
and ran
bluetoothctl
[bluetooth]# remove XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX
Reboot and voilà, Pulseaudio running and paired on the Pi and working! Only issue I have now is that I can't seem to get it to start automatically on boot. I've added to /etc/rc.local:
su -c 'pulseaudio --start' - pi
echo connect XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX | bluetoothctl
su -c 'pacmd set-card-profile bluez_card.68_54_FD_82_A9_BF a2dp' - pi
Well, to be precise, it pairs automatically on boot, but then drops out. If I manually run
pulseaudio --start
and
bluetoothctl
[bluetooth]# power on
[bluetooth]# agent on
[bluetooth]# default-agent
[bluetooth]# connect XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX
Then all works fine, stays rock solid. Despite the fact that I STILL have these error messages in the log:
cat /var/log/syslog | grep dbus
org.bluez.Manager.GetProperties() failed:
org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.UnknownMethod: Method "GetProperties" with
signature "" on interface "org.bluez.Manager" doesn't exist
Unable to contact D-Bus: org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.NotSupported:
Unable to autolaunch a dbus-daemon without a $DISPLAY for X11